Facebook is working on support for spdy protocol

By admin On Jul 16, 2012

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In an email to a w3 mailing list, Facebook indicated that it is in the process of implementing the spdy protocol on its website. The social networking site hopes to realize a major speed gain with this implementation.

Facebook engineer Doug Beaver reports in an email to a w3 mailing list that Facebook is in the process of implementing the spdy protocol into its website. The engineer also explains why the company is not interested in the other two http/2.0 proposals.

The spdy protocol is one of the proposals for a new http/2.0 implementation. The spdy protocol loads web pages faster and more securely, thanks to some additions to the old http protocol. Data connections are automatically multiplexed, compressed and usually also encrypted. Servers can also push data to clients without having to send a request.

In the e-mail, Beaver says that Facebook has requirements for a new HTTP implementation. For example, the protocol must support multiplexing, encryption at the transport layer, zero-latency upgrade, per-request flow control and server push. For that reason, Facebook supports the spdy protocol, to the detriment of the other proposals for the http/2.0 implementation. The company is also already implementing the spdy/v2 protocol, because recent browsers already support the protocol, thus achieving immediate speed gains.

The new protocol isn’t running on production servers yet, but Beaver said the implementation is nearly complete and Facebook has enough information to comment on the standard from a developers’ perspective. Although the company is already in the process of implementing the current spdy protocol, Facebook is still looking for improvements.

Twitter already announced in March that it had implemented and put into use the spdy protocol, and has responded to Facebook’s requirements for the protocol. In it, Twitter explains that it largely agrees with Facebook’s demands, but still questions the benefits of the current implementation of the compression functionality.